The mom-slaying mom returns to Survivor for her second chance at the title
(CBS)

Ciera Eastin rocks back and forth in a hammock, swinging in the sunlight along with her friend. It’s a pleasant afternoon, aside from the fact that Ciera is lying through her teeth to save her mom’s life.

In fairness, the first fib comes from Katie Collins. She is the daughter of Tina Wesson, the second Survivor champion, the eighth Survivor first-boot, and one of two Survivors currently living on Redemption Island. Katie is on the extreme outs of her tribe, and if she does not act fast, she will join her mother in exile in just a few hours.

At least, that’s what she thinks. In reality, Ciera’s mother Laura Morett is the target du jour. This is not news to Ciera — this is the will of her alliance, and she is willing to sacrifice her own mom in order to move forward — but she doesn’t like it, either, and she wants to postpone the execution.

And so we have Ciera, fighting for her mom’s life, versus Katie, fighting for her own, at war with one another as the hammock sways. Ciera has allies on her side; Katie has none. All she has is her buff, and a bluff: “I’m playing my idol tonight.” She does not have an idol to play. Ciera smiles at Katie’s lie, and engages it with one of her own:

CIERA: “Did you find it?”KATIE: “Yeah, I did.”CIERA: “No, you didn’t.”KATIE: “Why do you say that?”CIERA: “Because I know you didn’t.”KATIE: “How?”CIERA: “Because I have it.”KATIE: “…you do??”

Kudos to Katie for not falling out of her hammock, but the jig is up all the same. Best of all: Ciera does not, in fact, have the idol, but she has the stronger lie, and the greater ability to get her opponent to crack. In fact, she’s shocked at how quickly Katie backs down from the game. “That was easier than I thought it would be,” Ciera privately confesses a little bit later.

This is the first moment I think of when I think about Ciera Eastin. Forget the rocks. Forget what happened to her mom. It’s this moment in the hammock during Survivor: Blood vs Water, this spectacularly subtle act of deception, uttered with such nonchalance by someone so relaxed, without pause, without problem — it’s this little lie that tells me everything I need to know about what Ciera can pull off as a Survivor player.

If only it hadn’t come to this. Ciera and Katie began Survivor on the same Tadhana tribe with the same Tadhana problem: Brad Culpepper. Six days into the game, Brad and his Five Guy Alliance were hours away from voting out Rachel Foulger, an attempt to weaken her boyfriend Tyson Apostol, eventual winner of the season. Katie and Ciera were included in the plan, but they were suspicious of Rachel’s friendship with Dr. John Cody, the owner of an immunity idol clue, and someone who could wield that power against them.

Their solution? Put two votes on John. Even if he played his theoretical idol on Rachel, there would be enough votes on the good doctor to bounce him out of the game, and keep their torches lit another three days.

It was a promising sign of what the daughters of Laura Morett and Tina Wesson could pull off when put together, but the union was short-lived. Blame it on a tribe swap, blame it on the unusual dynamics of playing Survivor with and against loved ones — blame it on whatever you want, but the result is the same: Ciera and Katie were fast friends, but as allies, they never quite got off the ground.

“Let me lay this out to you,” she tells me as she sits down across from me in my cabana at Ponderosa, not even bothering to dry off from the rain coming down outside. “In past seasons, the winners are normally someone aligned early on in the game: Tyson and Gervase, Natalie and Boston Rob, Russell and Natalie White. I’m trying to find someone early where I can say, ‘You and I, we can’t trust anyone — but we need to make it to the end.'”

In other words, Ciera Eastin is seeking a friend for the end of the world — or at least the end of the game. She has designs to emulate the play style of some of the great Survivor winners, like the ones she mentions, and even Katie’s mother Tina, who won her season thanks in part to her carefully crafted camaraderie with a certain cowboy.

Already, Ciera has her eye on a few Second Chancers she wants to spend 39 days with in the hypothetical hammock — but the two people I expect her to name aren’t on the invite list.

Ciera’s first season, Blood vs Water, tasked ten returning players with competing against their loved ones. It was husband versus wife, fiancé versus fiancé, and — in the cases of Ciera and Laura, and Katie and Tina — mother versus daughter.

Two brothers were thrown into the thick of the battle as well: Aras Baskauskas, the golden child who won a previous season of Survivor, and his older sibling Vytas, the reformed bad boy who suffered from a heroin addiction earlier in his life. Their rivalry was an enormous part of Blood vs Water, and their downfall was even bigger, executed by a number of individuals, including Ciera.

Despite the fact that their interests were rarely aligned, Ciera and Vytas enter Second Chance with eyes on their backs. Many of the people about to hit the beach believe wholeheartedly that the Season 27veterans are one of the tightest pairs in the mix. Just ask Season 29’s Jeremy Collins, someone with personal Blood vs Water experience.

“They’re the two closest people out here,” he tells me hours before I speak with Ciera. “I can only assume everyone else knows that. They’re like family. You can tell. They can’t hide it. There was a time that Vytas was down on the beach, and someone asked, ‘Where’s Vytas?’ And Ciera said, ‘Oh, he’s on the beach.’ Like, that’s family! You have to watch that!”

Of course, when it comes to Ciera, not even blood relatives are safe from her Survivor wrath, let alone surrogate Blood siblings. Ciera is happy to see Vytas back on the beach on one level (“It’s obviously great to see a familiar face”), but his absence worries her just as much.

“He knows me,” she tells me. “He knows how I play. He knows how I am. There’s no faking him. I can’t put on an act. He’s someone out here who will see through it.”

Still, Ciera confirms Jeremy’s suspicions, at least to some extent: “I want to work with Vytas to a certain point. I think we can help each other out. But I think ultimately Vytas knows he can beat me. And I think he’s out for some type of revenge, because me and my mom outlasted him and his brother.”

“I think we can use each other for a little bit,” she continues, “but it’s one of those things where I need to get him before he gets me.”

Fortunately for Ciera, she does not have to deal with Vytas right away, as they will begin Second Chance on opposite tribes. But there’s someone else from Ciera’s past living on Bayon beach: Monica Padilla, hailing from Season 19, the same home season as Ciera’s mother Laura. Monica and Laura were extraordinarily tight during Samoa, but will that kinship exist between Monica and Laura’s daughter?

“I know my mom and her have talked throughout the years and stayed close,” Ciera says, “but I’ve never hung out with her at all, so I’m not sure what she’s thinking. I’m interested to know what her thoughts are.”

“For some reason, I just don’t see us playing together or getting along,” she says. “I can’t put my finger on it. I think she’s a little sneaky. I think my mom would tell me, ‘Hey, you can trust Monica.’ But she said, ‘You’ll have somebody in Monica,’ meaning a friend. I could be totally wrong — we could be best friends — but I don’t see us working together.”

So, if Ciera does not see herself establishing end-game alliances with the two people she’s most obviously connected to outside of Second Chance, who does she have her eye on? It’s a layered answer, it turns out, and it has roots in the person who won her first season.

Minutes after drawing out Katie’s idol lie, Ciera caught Tyson Apostol up on the conversation. She figured the information would convince Tyson to target Katie that night, instead of the original plan to vote out her mom. She figured wrong.

“Ciera’s smarter than we thought,” he confessed upon hearing the lie, both impressed and alarmed at once. It signaled the end for Laura Morett, voted out a few hours later by Tyson and her own daughter.

Even more importantly, it marked the beginning of the end of Ciera’s place in Tyson’s plans — for Blood vs Water, at least. Since Season 27 ended, the three-time Survivor player, one-time winner and one-man wrecking ball has provided Ciera with invaluable advice heading into her second season.

“A lot of it is really simple stuff,” she says. “Basically, he told me to steer the game in the direction I want it to go, which is really important for me. I don’t want to say I was a coattail rider, that I was in the passenger seat while somebody else was driving. He explained to me that I need to steer the game in the direction that I want it to go, and if I see it going in a direction I don’t want it to go, I have to bring it back, whether that’s by lying or creating doubt.”

Tyson also showed Ciera the value of driving with a co-pilot at the ready. She points out Tyson’s relationship with Gervase Peterson and Monica Culpepper as two of the strongest facets of his game, something she realized way too late to fix during her season.

“I learned how important it is to have that early alliance,” she says. “I didn’t start playing the game until halfway through, and at that point, there were already stronger bonds than the bonds I had created. I felt like it was too late.”

Ciera does not want to snooze past the alarm on Second Chance, she tells me. She wants to find her Gervase and her Monica — not Padilla, probably — as soon as possible. “I think it’s important to get out there early and establish alliances,” she says. “If you have a few? Fine. But you need to have one that you want to take to the end.”

And through Tyson, Ciera feels like she has one prospective partner already: Stephen Fishbach, runner-up of Survivor: Tocantins, the first season featuring Tyson.

“I would like to work with him,” she says. “I feel like we have a connection. I played with Tyson, and he played with Tyson. Maybe we’ll have some common ground there. I think we’ll get along. I think he’s smart. I think he’s under the radar.”

Stephen is also someone who is well-versed in Ciera’s proposed strategy of finding a wingman and staying true all the way through. That was his modus operandi throughout his season, taking turns at the wheel with J.T. Thomas, plowing through Tyson’s Timbira tribe with extraordinary efficiency. He doesn’t say much about Ciera when I get the chance to talk to him near the end of the day, but he does offer up one thing, without any prompting on my end: “She could be a great ally.”

Forgetting the Fishbach of it all, Ciera tells me she has other ride-or-die players in mind, like Kelley Wentworth from San Juan del Sur. “We both played with loved ones, her with her dad and me with my mom, and we’re both from the Pacific Northwest.” But she wants to stop short of mentally committing to anyone until she sees how the tribes shake out.

“I don’t want to get too labelly,” she says. “I could fall in love with Kass. I just don’t know! But ultimately, there’s no one coming out here where I’m like, ‘Ugh, that person!'”

And with that, here comes the bad news: Ciera is an ugh-that-person for certain individuals, and she has no one but herself to blame.

A long time ago, in a Survivor season far away, the final four competitors of Marquesas, the show’s fourth edition,could not come to a consensus on who to vote out. They were deadlocked, and up until that point in the show’s history, deadlocked ties were resolved by who received the most votes in the past. You can ask Jeff Varner all about it.

Past votes became a thing of the past starting here in the Marquesa, replaced by a new rule: Unbreakable votes would be broken by contestants drawing rocks from a bag, leaving the owner of the odd-colored rock out in the cold. Georgia judge Paschal English, who never once received a single vote in 37 days, was the unlucky soul who drew the punishing purple rock. It was the epitome of a nightmare scenario, a horror story that would haunt Survivor so thoroughly that the rocks were never seen again… until Ciera Eastin rolled along.

Two Tribal Councils after voting her own mother out of the game, Big Brother champ and Survivor rookie Hayden Moss finally convinced Ciera to see the reality of her situation: Tyson, Gervase and Monica planned to oust her at the Final Four, one day away from the final round of the game. Rather than ride out the inevitable, Ciera flipped, pushing the vote to rocks, risking her for-sure fourth place finish for a far-from-certain shot at a million bucks.

The gamble failed — Katie Collins drew the bad rock, and Ciera was voted out five days later for flipping — but it was a stunning television moment and an extraordinarily rare Survivor move, one that drew effusive praise from host Jeff Probst at the Blood vs Water live reunion show.

“If you ever get on the show, that’s how you play,” he said at the time. “You don’t play for four or five or to make the jury. You play to win.“

These days, Ciera does not regret the move, even if she only survived the rock draw by the skin of her teeth. Indeed, it was a coming-out party of sorts, a season-defining moment that proved Ciera’s willingness to go to the mat. “It was a good party,” she says, smiling at the memory. But she’s worried about the rocking reputation she’s bringing to Cambodia.

“I’m going to have to play that down,” she tells me. “I think that showed me as someone who flips, someone who is not afraid to make drastic big moves. People will say that I’m willing to do anything, that I’m unpredictable.”

It’s not Ciera’s only water-cooler moment, either. There’s the whole voting-out-her-mom thing, a move she made to solidify her bonds with Tyson’s team. She’s less concerned about that than she is about the rocks.

“I think that won’t hurt me too bad,” she says. “I think these people have all played before. I think they can respect a move I made to benefit myself, and I can explain to them, ‘I know it aired like I’m some evil person, but my mom knew it was going to happen.'”

Some Second Chancers doubt that Ciera voting out her mom was her idea to begin with. (“Was that move really hers?” Chaos Kass wonders aloud when I talk to her in a few minutes. “I don’t know if it was.”) But there are other players, like Peih-Gee Law, who see it as a big flashing “do not disturb” sign. And then there’s Vytas, who played with Ciera the first time. He does not expect things to work out well for her now. “I don’t see her making the merge, unfortunately,” he tells me later in the day.

For Ciera’s part, she knows she comes to Second Chance with rocks on her back. But she says the rocks have taught her a valuable lesson: “I think you don’t want to be so in the limelight of making the big move. You want to be able to claim the move, without being so obvious to everybody that this was my move.”

“I think that’s where my issue was last time,” she continues. “I might’ve drawn rocks too late, and it wasn’t good timing. Voting out my mom? Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Maybe I should have written someone else’s name down, and then that move wouldn’t have been so… I don’t know. But you can still claim that move: ‘My mom needed to go, but I didn’t need to write her name down.’ There are ways around it. It’s all about making moves without your people thinking of it as your move, but you can still claim it at Tribal.”

Ciera feels ready. She has studied Survivor under the guidance of winners like Tyson, Tina, and even Vytas’ brother Aras. “I’ve played with some great people, and I think I have an advantage because of that.” Beyond the champions, Ciera is the offspring of one of the most competitive women Survivor has ever seen — someone who, thankfully, stayed home this time.

“Everyone who has played with a loved one will tell you that this is better,” she laughs. “You don’t have to worry about anybody else. This time, it’s all on me.”

In fact, if there’s anyone Ciera is worried about, it’s herself. But if she’s nervous, she doesn’t show it. Throughout our conversation at Ponderosa, and throughout my visit to Bayon on the second day of Second Chance, mango circle included, Ciera looks just as relaxed as she looked on the day she shared a hammock with Katie Collins, and told a dirty rotten lie with an innocent smile.

“I’m going to hit the beach running,” she tells me. “I want to leave it all out there. I feel like I have such unfinished business.” Let’s see if she can find a business partner and resolve it.

Josh Wigler is a writer, editor and podcaster who has been published by MTV News, New York Magazine, Comic Book Resources, Digital Trends and more. He is the co-author of The Evolution of Strategy: 30 Seasons of Survivor, an audiobook chronicling the reality TV show’s transformation, and one of the hosts of Post Show Recaps, a podcast about film and television. Follow Josh on Twitter @roundhoward.

Visit Parade.com every week day until the September 23 premiere of Survivor: Cambodia – Second Chance for new stories from Josh’s trip to the set.

AMG/Parade Digital

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